


speaking of loss/i began with everything

by goodbyechunkylemonmilk



Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: F/F, Pre-Canon, Pre-Slash, Rule 63, Suicidal Thoughts, Suicide Attempt
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-15
Updated: 2017-03-15
Packaged: 2018-10-05 14:34:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,238
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10310411
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/goodbyechunkylemonmilk/pseuds/goodbyechunkylemonmilk
Summary: Ronan has been miserable since her father died, but that doesn't mean she wants to die herself, not really. Unfortunately, she doesn't have much of a chance of getting anyone to believe that once she's landed herself in the hospital with severe blood loss and wounds sustained at the claws of a nightmare made real.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Content warnings: References to suicide and suicidal thoughts, obviously. There are a couple descriptions that could be classified as graphic but none are particularly detailed. There's a fair amount of flippancy regarding mental health in general, some of which is insulting to mentally ill people.
> 
> I thought long and hard about the best way to refer to these characters, and ultimately, I decided not to change Ronan's name for the sake of consistency in the primary pairing, since obviously Gansey remained Gansey. All side characters had their names changed but it should be fairly evident who's who.

Even before her father died, back when the worst thing that had ever happened to her was a fight with her older sister, Ronan always had the feeling of something about to go wrong. Her father was important, she knew that, and involved in something that was, at best, just this side of illegitimate. That knowledge, combined with a childish love of spy thrillers, led her to cultivate skills she thought would be useful if she were ever kidnapped. She stepped up her boxing. She learned to tell time by the sun, and to navigate without a compass. She taught herself to wake up quickly and quietly, to keep her eyes shut and her breath even until she had a chance to evaluate her surroundings.

Ronan wakes up feeling like she’s been torn open, but she holds still, remembering those practice sessions from before her world exploded, back when her father seemed immortal and violence, not boxing but _true_ violence, was something that only happened in action movies. It takes a while before she can make the noise around her resolve into words—her head aches in the telltale way of a concussion—and then to attribute the words to the people saying them.

“—thought we were doing well,” Gansey says, voice wobbling.

“Did you?” Ronan hears, sardonic. This speaker is a little harder to identify, just because no one’s been burnt into her psyche quite like Gansey, but she recognizes Ava quickly enough, head injury or no. She can’t begin to guess the time, not having lost so much of it, but between class, homework, and her seemingly endless stream of menial jobs, Ava always has somewhere to be, and it’s nice that she’s taken the time to sit, pointlessly, in what must be Ronan’s hospital room.

“Not ‘well,’ then, but _okay_. I didn’t think it was this bad. I didn’t think she’d—” Gansey chokes up. Ronan focuses on keeping her muscles loose and relaxed, on not gritting her teeth or reaching for Gansey’s hand. “What if Noa hadn’t found her in time?”

“She did.”

“But what if—”

“There’s no point in doing that right now,” Ava snaps. “Noa did find her in time, and the ambulance got there, and she’s alive. Devin said they’re going to hold her until she’s stable, and then we’ll see.”

“That is not acceptable,” Gansey says in what Ronan has come to think of as her Young Republican voice, prim and proper, like an ancient god blew life into a cardigan and a neatly-pressed pair of slacks. “That is not a _plan_.”

“Well, it’s a good thing neither of you is her legal guardian, so no one expects you to come up with a plan, and wouldn’t take it seriously if you did.” Ronan flinches at the sound of Devin’s voice booming through the room, and realizes only then that Gansey and Ava had been whispering. They must all find Devin’s entrance equally startling, because no one seems to notice her lapse in control. “Fortunately,” Devin continues, “Ronan has an actual adult in her life. So here’s what’s going to happen. She’s going to stay in here until they feel they can safely release her, and then she’s going to move out of that death trap you’re all squatting in and into Aglionby housing, where the dorm monitors will be given a very general description of her mental state and will know to look out for her. She will follow the rules and she will go to class and I will not get any more two a.m. calls saying it looks like my little sister _chewed into her own wrists_. _That_ is the plan.”

“Ronan will never agree to that,” Gansey says.

“Ronan is fifteen and unstable. Excuse me for saying so, but her opinion really doesn’t matter. The other option is that I leave her here, and they set her up in the best padded room money can buy, and once she gets tired of that, we go right back to plan A. You can’t even tell that she’s only pretending to be asleep right now so I’m certainly not going to let you be in charge of keeping her alive. Because you did so _well_ this time.” The pain in Ronan’s wrists must have her off-balance because when Devin snaps, “Open your eyes!” she does, right on cue, the fluorescent lights burning her retinas. Devin performs a little flourish, like a magician’s assistant. “Ta da.”

Ronan takes stock of her body; though everything hurts, the only bandages she can see are on her wrists. She tries to think of an explanation that is neither suicide attempt nor nightmare wraith, and comes up blank. “Devin, that’s happening over my dead fucking body. Almost-dead isn’t quite good enough.”

Ronan is accustomed, by now, to what it looks like when she has so disappointed Gansey that the part of her that is Ronan’s best friend shuts off. Her eyes dim and she sets her lips and she leans away, which is the only time Ronan ever notices how close Gansey usually is to her. She does all of these things now, and though Ronan is used to them, and even goes out of her way to cause them, a nauseous feeling settles low in her stomach—a reaction she blames on whatever they’ve been pumping in to her, of which she definitely needs another dose.

“Devin,” Gansey says through a grit-toothed smile, “can I speak to you in the hall?”

As they leave, Gansey leans over and mutters to Ava, “Keep an eye on her,” as if Ronan’s going to slip out of her bed while Ava’s back is turned and hang herself with her shoelaces.

Ava checks the cracked face of her watch, and winces. “You can go, you know. I promise not to slit my wrists while your back is turned.” Ronan holds one hand palm up so that the gauzy padding is on display. “Well, not again.”

Ava’s face twists in a display of anger that might be intimidating if Ronan didn’t know very well by now that there are worse things in life than the ire of a prep school girl, even one on scholarship. “Everyone was really worried, you know. We’ve been here all night, even Devin. She’s been pacing the halls for hours.”

“There’s probably some clause in the will that says she gets an extra ten grand if she keeps me alive through my eighteenth, and the rest of you… I didn’t ask you to come and I didn’t want you to, so quit it with the self-righteous bullshit and just fuck off.”

Ava takes a breath, clearly gearing up for a fight like Ronan is itching for, but then she looks down at Ronan’s wrist, still outstretched, and finally what comes out is, “It’s been a long night, but I’m not going to fight with you while you lie in a hospital bed, so just cut it out. Noa’s been locked in her room freaking out because she’s the one who found you and Gansey keeps sneaking off to the bathroom to cry and Devin’s screamed at every single doctor, nurse, and intern she could hunt down. We’re missing class right now, which maybe isn’t important to you but kind of matters to me and the _scholarship board_. We’re all here because we care about you, so you need to just accept it and stop trying to push everyone away.”

Ronan makes a point of rolling her eyes, but there isn’t much she can say to that, not with the way her heart’s beating in her chest so hard and so fast that she feels like she’ll choke on it, so she lies back against the scratchy standard-issue pillowcase and stews in the injustice of it all. Her only comfort is that Ava seems as miserable as she is, her gaze darting constantly around the room only to land on her watch every time. Ronan holds out as long as she can, until the huffed sighs get the best of her, landing somewhere between infuriating and guilt-inducing.

 “You _could_ go, you know,” she says, staring at her folded hands like it’s nothing to her. “I really won’t do anything, and you could still make the second half of the day.”

Ava rolls her eyes. “Gansey’s probably blockaded the door from the outside so I don’t shirk my guard duties.”

Demonstrating the uncanny Gansey family ability to appear immediately after the use of her name, Gansey pops back into the room, her hair disheveled like she’s been tugging at it. She heaves a sigh. “Well. Devin has agreed that you should come back to Monmouth after they discharge you. I pointed out to her that if you’re uncomfortable, you’re more likely to, um, act out, and that you’ve run away before. She does want you to have regular sessions with the Aglionby guidance counselor through the end of the academic year.” Gansey holds up a hand to halt Ronan’s imminent protest. “I know, I know, but you have to admit, you didn’t exactly give me a lot to work with here. Can we table it, please, just for now?”

Ronan takes a deep breath and lets it out slowly, hoping that by the end of it, she’ll have summoned, from somewhere deep inside herself, the wherewithal to be gracious about the favor Gansey’s just done for her. “Fine. I’m not doing it, but I guess Devin doesn’t have to know that. Is that good enough for you, your Highness?”

Gansey sags back into the seat closest to the head of Ronan’s bed, cheap plastic creaking under her. “Fine.”

 

 

 

Devin gives Ronan a week before she has to be back in school. Normally she would fight it just to make a point, but ever since the hospital, Gansey has looked bruised and tired, and maybe she’s just a little bit softer than she’s always thought. Though Gansey hasn’t said anything, Ronan knows she hasn’t been sleeping, that she’s set herself up by the front door like a sentinel. So Ronan rides it out, sits in the main room during the day where she can be visibly alive, and makes noise in her room at night so Gansey will know she hasn’t slithered out the window and crawled off to die on the side of the road.

The days go by too quickly, so that she blinks and, somehow, it’s Sunday night and she’s looking down at her wrists, unbandaged against doctor’s orders. She’s never spent all that much time worrying about what the other Aglionby students think of her, but she certainly isn’t going to walk into the lion’s den with her vulnerable underbelly bared.

She and Gansey go out together to scavenge whatever bracelets or watches can be found in the bargain bins of the only twenty-four-hour store for forty miles. Together, because Ronan isn’t allowed to go alone. No one says it, but every time she grabs for her car keys, Gansey stands and stretches unconvincingly, says, “Man, I could really go for a drive right now,” and follows her down the stairs. From there it’s easy enough to allow Gansey to herd her to the Pig instead of her own BMW. She wants to feel insulted, but it’s hard to reject the feeling of Gansey’s arm around her shoulders and their hips bumping against each other as they walk.

She could fight to drive, but the truth is that even if she didn’t slit her wrists, something that came from her mind did. The truth is that she can’t trust her sleeping mind, and she can’t trust her waking one either, because maybe she didn’t fight as hard as she could have, maybe in those few precious moments of consciousness as she breathed in the biting cold of the real world, she thought, “Good,” thought, “Finally.” Maybe she pretended to sleep not out of curiosity or embarrassment, but disappointment. She could insist on being left to her own devices, but she can no longer depend on her hands to do what she tells them to.

Gansey shifts gears and says over the ominous grinding noise that means she’s going a bit too fast, “I don’t mean to make this about myself.” She’s using her diplomatic voice, neat and even, the one that usually means Ronan has done something so completely beyond the pale, has been so completely difficult, that Gansey is afraid any display of emotion will only make things worse. Ronan stares down at her wrists, which look less like parts of her body than something from a delicatessen and thinks that this isn’t fair, that this would perhaps be even _less_ fair had she actually landed herself in the hospital on purpose.

“This isn’t about me, and my job right now is to be the best friend I can be to you.” Gansey keeps her eyes trained on the road, hands locked at ten and two. “Ronan,” she says, and then, much sharper, “Dammit!” Which Ronan doesn’t understand at first as a present-tense expletive, not one directed of her, until they’ve pulled over onto the shoulder and Gansey’s hunched over the steering wheel, shoulders heaving. “I’m sorry,” she says, voice deceptively calm. She swipes a thumb under each eye. “I couldn’t see through. Well.” She flutters a hand to communicate tears so thick they compromised her ability to drive. “I just need a second.”

 Ronan wants to reach out, to do something, but no one has ever expected her to comfort them before, and everything she can think of seems to fall flat. So she sits, suffocated by the sound of Gansey’s sobs hiccupping to a stop.

“I’m sorry,” Gansey repeats. “But it was really scary. I thought we’d been doing all right and then—I just don’t know if I’m doing the right thing. I don’t want you to get hurt because I’m too busy playing adventurer to realize how serious what you’re going through is.”

“Someone’s been talking to Devin,” Ronan says, recognizing the familiar cadence and sting of her sister’s speech.

“But she’s right!” Gansey finally uncurls one hand from its vice grip on the steering wheel, only to slam it back against the cracked leather. “I don’t know what I’m doing here, and I’ve been trusting that you do. I’m the one who argued in favor of you staying at Monmouth, and I don’t mean to push but I can’t be the reason you don’t get the help you need.”

Ronan flexes her fingers, relishing the sting of new pink skin stretching. “Gansey—”

“I didn’t have friends growing up, not like this, not like us. I was weird, and I wasn’t interested in the things other kids were interested in, and someone always had to be watching when I played outside.” She sniffles. “I didn’t even think I was missing out, not really. I had people I liked, who liked me. And then I met you. And I knew how lonely I’d been before.”

“Gansey—”

“And so maybe I’ve been biased. Maybe I’ve been unfair to you, because I want you to stay. I thought I was looking out for your best interests, but maybe I’ve just been looking out for my own.” Gansey finally takes her red-rimmed eyes off the road and meets Ronan’s gaze. “I don’t want to lose you, but if I let that get in the way of encouraging you to take care of yourself, if I do now or if I did before, I couldn’t take that.”

“It wasn’t your fault.” Ronan tries to come up with something honest and reassuring, tries to think past the remembered feeling of claws ripping through her flesh. She didn’t do this, but she isn’t innocent either, and she doesn’t want to make promises her psyche won’t let her keep. “It was a bad day, and I’d been drinking. It’s been hard. I don’t think anyone understands how hard it’s been. What it was like to see—When I close my eyes, his corpse—I’d been drinking, and it was a bad day, and I went for a walk to clear my head. I just got confused.”

“You could talk to me, next time. Or we could just sit. I know I can’t understand, but you don’t have to be alone in this. I don’t sleep either; I’d be happy to stay up with you.  I could always use more help with my model of Henrietta. Or we could go for drives. This is nice, isn’t it? Well.” Gansey laughs, just this side of hysterical, and Ronan grabs her hand without thinking about it, pries it off the steering wheel and holds it between both of her own. “Not this. This is pretty terrible, I’m sure. But if I weren’t crying, if I weren’t making you talk about, God help us, feelings. I’d even let you drive the Pig sometime. I know this is all stupid, and small, and skirting around the issue, but I just. I don’t know if I’m helping.”

Ronan tries to remember what she was like before, when she went to her family’s farm on long weekends and did Irish folk song competitions and, even more implausible, told people about them. When she wasn’t constantly oscillating between angry and numb with no chance to breathe in between. No one would have called her _kind_ , not even at her most innocent, but when Gansey looks at her, it’s hard not to believe she can be better.

“Don’t tell anyone I said this, because it will completely ruin my rep, which we both know I worked very hard for, but I care about you. I would do—” She takes a deep breath, rubbing her thumb in circles against Gansey’s wrist as she speaks. “I would do almost anything for you. So I’ll be careful. And if I think things are getting that bad again, you’ll be the person I go to. That’s all I can promise you, so it has to be enough.”

“Okay.” Gansey pulls her hand back and wipes her eyes. She blinks and suddenly the mask is back in place and she’s the heir to the Gansey family fortune, effortlessly friendly and approachable, as comfortable with her peers as she is with United States congressmen. If Ronan hadn’t seen her crying just a minute before, she wouldn’t believe it. “Okay!” Gansey repeats, more upbeat. “Let’s get going then. Those bracelets aren’t going to buy themselves.”

Once they’re back on the road, Gansey sneaks a glance to the side, and Ronan realizes that she’s left her hand palm-up between their seats, an expectant vulnerability that feels even worse, somehow, than having woken up in hospital bed after a supposed suicide attempt. She intends to snatch it back and say something biting, maybe about how she’s going to absolutely wreck the Pig the second she gets behind the wheel, but before she can, Gansey reaches out and joins their hands. Ronan, for the first time since she walked outside and found her father spread all over their driveway, allows herself to soften, to feel safe. Gansey can’t protect her, not in real life and certainly not in her dreams, but for a moment, she feels the world shrink down to just the front seat of the Pig, to Gansey’s hand in hers, the night air rushing by, and she lets herself breathe.

**Author's Note:**

> Title from Lucille Clifton's "speaking of loss."
> 
> I realized very belatedly that I can't remember if Ronan canonically dreamed up his leather bands or if I'm just mixing that up with the ones Kavinsky dreamed for him, but I'm too deep in this to turn back now.


End file.
